Category Archives: Rants and Appreciations

All Hail the King (of Instruments)

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That’s me, or the back of my head, in the left foreground, marveling over the glorious pipe organ at St. Francis de Sales this past November, while the legendary Olivier Latry demonstrates the features of the recently restored instrument after a wonderful recital that I will eventually get around to discussing in a separate blog post (that’s the aspiration, anyway). Photo by Amy Bautz copyright November 2023.

As much as I would prefer to pretend that a good four months hasn’t elapsed since my last blog update, I feel obliged to attempt some kind of explanation. The truth, sadly, is that I have been very lazy and didn’t feel like it. Instead of blogging, I have been doing my best to keep up with my freelance work while indulging my fitful enthusiasms, which range from French perfume to Chappell Roan to the Dolly Parton crazy quilt I started a few months ago in a kind of aspirational delirium. I began the crazy quilt as a coping mechanism because I was having nightmares about the news and felt a conflicting need to stay informed. Essentially, my one crazy trick is that I work on my Dolly quilt while I listen to my embummening world-news programs. I peer at my crooked stitches instead of the endless footage of starving babies, burned and mutilated children, flattened neighborhoods, and inconceivable civilian carnage. I can’t swear my technique is morally defensible, but it’s allowing me to stay informed without going entirely insane. I would describe my primitive needlework as a form of meditation, only with supplementary blood and cursing. If it’s not quite a thought preventer, it’s also not a thought promoter.

An actual photograph of me, not updating my blog with the many program notes I have written in recent months. The only difference, if you must know, is that I’m wearing a flannel shirt, old Adidas track pants, and a co-dependent elderly Chihuahua mix.

I might have continued lolling indefinitely on my reliable dilettante setting, but I feel strongly compelled to evangelize on an unrelated topic, one that’s more interesting than my lamentable work habits, and that is the pipe organ. More precisely, I would like to recommend one of my favorite ways to learn more about it: the superb weekly radio program The King of Instruments. I’ll get around to reviewing this treasured resource soon, I promise, but in the meantime, click on that hyperlink, choose any episode from the show website’s clearly organized archives, and listen for yourself. Do yourself a favor and listen through some decent speakers or headphones, not your dogshit built-in phone or laptop speakers. The best argument in favor of pipe organ music is always going to be listening to it.

The pipe organ is a difficult instrument to master, but it’s also difficult to understand if you’re not an organist, which is true of myself as well as almost everyone else on this planet. It’s a gigantic, implausible, Rube Goldberg–like contraption that transforms a building’s architecture into an enormous amplifier and speaker to transmit the baddest-ass sounds you’ve ever registered in your actual ass (those wooden church pews are startlingly good conductors). If you tried to describe the instrument to someone who had never seen or heard of one, they might imagine something out of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, or maybe a sentient gargoyle-ghost who speaks through the walls and makes your spine and molars vibrate with his godlike basso profundo. What other instrument can be felt in the body—not just in the organist’s body but in the bodies of all the audience members, all those inside the uncanny musical valley carved out by the pipe organ? As a teenager I used to attend punishingly loud punk-rock concerts, made possible by towering stacks of crackling Marshalls—I’m lucky, undeservedly so, that my hearing remains intact—but the loudness of a pipe organ is altogether different from the Ramonesian, feedback-blasting-out-my-ears-makes-me-so-high kind of loudness that I craved from age 14 to 17 or so. Even at its shrillest or most stentorian, the pipe organ doesn’t hurt your ears so much as rattle your bones.

Thanks to my regular longtime freelance gig for the fabulous Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which contains one of the finest concert pipe organs in the country, the Lay Family concert organ at the Meyerson, I have been writing about the vast organ repertoire for years. If nothing else, I’m a diligent researcher, so I know a fair amount about the composers and the histories of the various organs and organ builders (ask me about Aristide Cavaillé-Coll!), and I always interrogate organists if I’m given half a chance, but I never try to conceal the fact that I couldn’t begin to tell you how the whole thing works. In my defense, few people could, apart from organists, and it takes them many years of study to get remotely competent. To play the organ requires a peculiar devotion, even beyond the hours and hours of disciplined practice that musicians who play other instruments routinely log. You need to be one part pianist, one part tap dancer, one part music historian, and one part carpenter-handyman-bricoleur. Strictly speaking, you don’t need to be a skilled improviser, capable of spontaneous feats of complex counterpoint at a moment’s notice, but it helps a lot, insofar as most of the superstar organists can do this in their sleep, especially if they’re trained in the French school—and more on that later, when I finally get around to writing about the Olivier Latry recital at St. Francis de Sales Oratory Catholic church, a short stroll from my home in St. Louis.

I would assume that most proficient organists possess unusually good, maybe even photographic, memories, because how else would they possibly remember where all the stops are, especially if they play numerous organs, all with varying numbers of ranks and manuals? Sure, every piano feels different to a pianist, and every piano has its own personality, its own quirks and distinctive voicings, but pipe organs vary a lot more than pianos do. In fact, I would propose (or wildly speculate) that every pipe organ is unique, because even if two organs were created by the same builder, around the same time, they are still housed in different acoustical structures—the New Cathedral in St. Louis, with its acres of glittering mosaics and its vaulted ceilings, is going to create a very different sonic environment than a concert hall expressly designed for and by audiophiles. As much as I love the organ rep, I am a lazy sod, too busy huffing perfume and stitching my crazy Dolly Parton Crazy Quilt to study the organ with the kind of discipline it demands, so I’m grateful for the many organists I have encountered, both IRL and online, who share their knowledge and passion for the instrument with the legions of total dumbasses like myself. (Please don’t be offended that I’m corraling, or chorale-ing, you into my dumbass cohort—to organists we are all rank amateurs when it comes to their instrument.)   

Early on, when I first started covering the organ-recital series at the Meyerson in Dallas, my longtime friend and birthday buddy Jim Utz, a legend in his own right, introduced me to his friend Brent Johnson, the organist at Third Baptist. Through Brent’s late and sadly lamented (by meeeeee) organ recital series at the church, Friday Pipes, which is currently on hiatus, I renewed my passion for pipe organ and began peppering the endlessly patient Brent with dumb questions and comical mispronunciations of German composers’ names (I cringe to recall how I once put a French flair on the name Reger, even though I knew he wasn’t French, simply because I don’t speak German and tried to wing it—one of the perils of being an autodidact who gets most of her information from reading books.) Anyway, via Brent I discovered his YouTube series for the Organ Media Foundation, in which he gives tours of various organs that he visits, discusses with the resident organist, and (I would assume) helps keep in good repair. These videos are absolutely invaluable to me as a researcher because I’m a visual learner, and it helps me to see where the pipes and reeds are located. I also enjoy the interviews with the organists, who know their instruments the way Brent knows his charge at Third Baptist. 

Most organists are ambassadors, if not evangelists, for their instruments, which are poorly understood and often unfairly maligned (don’t get me started—no, really, don’t—because my digressions are approaching David Foster Wallace territory, which is no place for anyone besides DFW to be, and likely not even him insofar as he is long dead). But Brent is an especially effective and tireless advocate for his instrument, and one of my favorite discoveries among his good works is the radio program that he produces, The King of Instruments, which airs in the St. Louis area on Classic 107.3, on Sundays at the unreasonable hour of 7:00 a.m CT, and is available online everywhere, at a more humane hour, for which we night owls are grateful. On the website or Soundcloud feed, you can listen to many, many hours of hour-long archived programs, all thoughtfully conceived and organized according to a particular theme or concept. The two hosts, Mark Scholtz and Bill Stein, speak smoothly but never smarmily. They’re authoritative but never pedantic when they introduce these composers, works, performers, and organs. I especially enjoy learning how many ranks and manuals a particular organ has, when it was built, and by whom, because these details aren’t as readily available as, say, the birth and death dates of a specific Baroque contrapuntist. Having listened to a good dozen or more of these archived programs, I find that the hosts provide precisely the correct amount of nerdly detail. Scholtz and Stein leave you feeling cheerful and enlightened, not bored and hopelessly overwhelmed by unrelated factoids.

The best part, of course, is the music. Despite the hundreds of organ annotations and blurbs that I have cranked out over the past decade, The King of Instruments constantly reminds me how little I know and how lightly I have scratched the surface of the repertoire. Even if I stopped listening to Linda Smith and Lloyd Miller and Sexyy Red and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and all the thousands of other, unrelated music makers that I find myself listening to, I wouldn’t be able to hear more than a tiny fraction of all the gazillions of gorgeous fugues and toccatas that have been piling up over the centuries, not to mention all the ones that were improvised on the spot and therefore lost forever, unless they were captured on tape, as many improvisations these days seem to be, fortunately. (Glass-half-empty version: think of all the brilliant Bach improvisations that we’ll never hear simply because they were never recorded—in a perfect world, we might all be trading Bach tapes like the Deadheads do with Jerry Garcia bootlegs.) 

The King of Instruments is a highly enjoyable listen if you’re looking for a pleasant soundtrack rather than a college-level lecture enumerating the differences between the French and German schools of organ building. I’m looking for both, as it happens, so I’m content regardless, but I understand if you just want to listen to something while you fold laundry or vacuum the car or respond to emails. I get it because I use music for such purposes myself, and the house of music has many rooms, blah blah blah. It turns out that The King of Instruments suits this function, too, because the show is mostly devoted to music, not to the blah blah blah that I am doing too much of while attempting to sing the praises of this blameless radio program. 

One caveat that will be obvious to organists and experienced organ lovers: no matter how great your speakers are, this music simply will not and cannot sound as good as it did when it was being performed, in its native environment. It isn’t possible, so don’t freak out too much, audiophiles. To get that sound, you would need to have a pipe organ in your home (like some lucky Edwardian heiress!), and unless you also occupy a limestone mansion with soaring ceilings, you’re just not going to nail that Notre-Dame de Paris vibe, sorry. Nevertheless, Brent ensures that the sound quality is as good as it can possibly be, especially if you avail yourself of a decent sound system, or better yet headphones, which more closely approximate the immersive effects of hearing this music performed live, on a real pipe organ, although it obviously can’t achieve the full body effects of the live performance. 

Despite their limitations, recordings preserve performances by the dead or otherwise unavailable, so they will always have that going for them. I don’t know about you, but counterpoint works a peculiar magic on me. I suck at math (I failed beginning high-school algebra two years in a row), and consequently I would never be able to compose true counterpoint myself, except in the most rudimentary fashion, after tearful hours of trial and error on my tragically underused Knabe parlor grand, whereupon I might come up with something that kindasortamaybe resembles a campsite round, but this is a limitation I cannot correct at my age. Besides, I think my ignorance of the procedure surely contributes to my awe. A Bach fugue is a balm to the ears and brain, exerting a magical organizing effect on my flibbertigibbet consciousness, which typically compels me to mutter Nelly lyrics when I’m supposed to be researching Das Rheingold, or to get sucked down YouTube rabbit holes that invariably lead to Soul Train, my own little Lotos-Land, where I linger for long stretches, propped on beds of amaranth and moly, beneath a heaven dark and holy, etc.

At any rate, if your brain functions or malfunctions like mine, it’s often better to leave the listening choices in expert hands for at least an hourlong chunk or so while you recalibrate. You could pick any episode of The King of Instruments at random, and you would have chosen wisely. I have yet to hear a show that didn’t contain something new and wonderful that I would almost certainly never have heard elsewhere, including many recordings that aren’t even commercially available, recordings that members of the Organ Media Foundation made themselves, with the performers’ permission, of course. 

One recent KOI episode (February 11, 2024) was devoted entirely to the organist, composer, and organ consultant Charles Callahan, who died last year on Christmas day. Going into the show, I was completely ignorant of Callahan; one hour later, I understood why they wanted to do a tribute show on this fascinating and talented person. To my delight, the Callahan playlist included a pair of older recordings (2008-ish) that were recorded in the magnificent Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, which we natives usually call the New Cathedral and which I first had the privilege of touring as a gape-jawed 16-year-old. The organ—and the late Callahan—sound exquisite.  

On another, specially expanded recent episode—the last show of 2023, dated December 31—a panel of organist guests join the hosts to discuss their favorite organ works. This was an especially compelling installment for me because I love to hear organists discuss their own experiences learning and then performing a piece—which often means relearning it if they need to play it on a different instrument. “Playing something like this,” one organist says of a favorite toccata, “is the reason we all became organists.” 

I’m especially grateful for the shows that focus on the many composers and musicians whose works have been historically underrepresented and underprogrammed, talented people who more than deserve our attention. Many of them are featured on the following first-rate episodes: Women Organists, American Women Composers, European Women Composers, and Black Composers. The good news is that these marginalized artists are getting programmed more frequently, and audiences are increasingly eager to hear music that has been unfairly neglected or deemed unworthy of the canon; the bad news, at least from the annotator’s perspective, is that there is seldom much in the way of reliable information on these works, which means it’s that much easier to make and perpetuate errors. (Ask me how I know, lolsob!) These research challenges make me even more grateful for resources like The King of Instruments. For instance, I thought I knew a fair amount about Florence Price, a brilliant Black American composer who has interested me for a long time and about whom I have written intermittently. Despite this knowledge, I learned a few new facts about her from The King of Instruments and enjoyed a performance that I probably wouldn’t have heard otherwise. I also appreciate the fact that even though the hosts might focus on the artists’ shared race or gender in those aforelinked episodes, they don’t pigeonhole their subjects on the basis of demographic data. For instance, the female composer Fanny Mendelssohn, the prodigiously talented sister of Felix Mendelssohn, is represented in her brother’s episode, which makes sense when you consider how close the two siblings were and how deeply they influenced and complemented each other.

This review is too already too long, or I’d go into more detail about why I consider The King of Instruments to be an invaluable resource for the organ lover. I also maintain that everyone is a potential organ lover. One way to test the truth of that boast is to tune in to The King of Instruments sometime soon. Who knows, it might even inspire you to darken the door of a church in search of your next pipe fix.





The Muse Known as Misia

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Misia photographed by her great friend and admirer Edouard Vuillard, in 1901

In 2009 the French musicologist David Lamaze identified a distinctively Ravelian three-note motif, E-B-A, as a musical cipher for “Misia.” The concise theme, which surfaces at critical points in La Valse and throughout Ravel’s work, is expressed as mi-si-la in French solfège intervals. This is likely a coded reference to the composer’s friend Misia Sert (née Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska), the glamorous and enigmatic pianist, muse, patron, painter, and artist’s model who was known as the Queen of Paris. Ravel dedicated La Valse to her, along with his famous song “Le Cygne” (The Swan). Her piano teacher, Gabriel Fauré, was disappointed when she chose not to follow his advice and pursue a career as a concertizing pianist. She decided instead to marry, which she did three times (and was thrice divorced).
 
Because she was a great friend of its founder, the designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the French luxury brand Chanel named a limited-edition fragrance after Sert in 2016. Created by the parfumier Olivier Polge, Misia is meant to conjure the ambience of opera-hall dressing rooms: a complex concoction of rose, iris, and violet, with hints of talcum powder, amber, leather, and tonka bean. Like my beloved bottle of Misia eau de parfum, which I store in the refrigerator to delay the inevitable process of oxidation, La Valse is decadent: laden with a sense of lateness, the ripe promise of rot. And to quote the great philosopher Peggy Lee, “If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing.”
 
 
Misia by Pierre Bonnard
Misia by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
Misia with Renoir and friends
Misia with her first husband and their dog, by Bonnard
Misia with her second husband, whom she married at the urging of her first husband, who was badly in debt. This one, she said, turned her into the most spoiled girl in the world (she didn’t mean this in a good way).
Misia with her great friend Coco Chanel and Diaghilev (background). I don’t know who the woman holding the parasol is. Misia is the one holding the happy dog.

Misia on the cover of the literary journal she founded with her first husband
Misia (foreground) with her great friend Coco Chanel, who would prepare her body for burial and mourn her the rest of her life.

Misia in profile

Weird Work in Progress

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Sergio Larrain, 1957

I kept thinking I ought to update my blog because I was probably falling behind, but I didn’t bother to check to see when my last update was, and I’m genuinely surprised to learn that it was nearly a month ago. I don’t feel like I have been messing around and slacking off, but the page views don’t lie.

I have been busy writing, but I am not always writing what I ought to be writing, the writing for which I am paid and which my clients have a reasonable expectation of receiving. I have been writing the first draft of a novel that has been marinating in my mind for the past three years or so, maybe longer. I know I am definitely using sections that I wrote back in 2021.

I’m too superstitious to say too much about it, and I don’t want to jinx it by discussing the plot too much before the first draft is complete, but it’s kind of a magical-realist horror novel about identity, art, and motherhood, with a special emphasis on muses and monsters.

Instead of prattle on too much about something I may very well never finish, I will share some of the photos that are inspiring me for reasons that I hope will be clear to at least a few people someday. As a lifelong compulsive reader, I have always suspected that there are far more great novels out there than I will ever be able to read, which is a huge disincentive to write, because why contribute to the glut, right? Most people don’t read anything close to the 70 or so novels that I’ll probably end up reading this year, and believe me I don’t make a dent in my Daunting Queue. I could show you my Goodreads stats, but why bother? We all know that the world needs another novel like it needs another novel coronavirus.

And yet why not finish it, even if it never gets published? I already know it’s not going to be another Moby Dick, and that manuscript was a total flop in Melville’s lifetime, so who can say what will happen? But if I never finish writing it, I’ll for sure never know.

All the subjects in these photos are somehow significant in the novel, but it is not a historical novel. And that’s the last thing I’ll say about it because I hate enigmatic posts and related forms of rhetorical coyness!

Many of these photos are of Manon Gropius, whose Wikipedia entry lists her occupation as Muse.

Some gig, huh? Berg called her an angel, and Canetti called her a gazelle, and her polarizing mother pawned her off on Austrofascists. Kid never stood a chance.


The young Alma Mahler (Alma Schindler)
Alma Mahler with her daughters Maria and Anna
Alma with her daughter Manon Gropius
Manon Gropius, with her father, Walter
Manon and Walter
Manon Gropius, 1933, shortly before she contracted the polio that eventually killed her.

Oh, and just to keep this connected to my regular writing career, here are some program notes that I wrote about Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, which he wrote in memory of Manon, whom he called an angel.

A Double Requiem

Berg’s Violin Concerto, his last completed composition and arguably his most beloved, serves both as an elegy for Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old girl that he had loved like a surrogate daughter, and as a requiem for himself. Indeed, he died shortly after finishing it. According to his wife, he worked at a frantic pace, as if he knew his days were numbered. “I cannot stop,” he explained when she begged him to slow down. “I do not have time.” 

In 1904, when Berg was 19 years old, his older brother brought a stack of his lieder to Arnold Schoenberg, who had placed a newspaper ad seeking composition students. Although Berg’s family was too poor to pay for lessons, Schoenberg took him on anyway. Between 1901 and 1908, Berg wrote approximately 150 songs and other vocal works. After the dismal failure of his Altenberg Lieder in 1912, he stopped writing songs. Until his sudden, squalid death at age 50, from an infected insect bite, Berg focused almost exclusively on two operas: Wozzeck, which he completed in 1922, and Lulu, which remained unfinished when he died, on Christmas Eve, 1935.

Commissioned by the American violinist Louis Krasner, the Violin Concerto was Berg’s last completed work. When Krasner first approached Berg with the proposal, the composer was busy with Lulu and reluctant to crank out a glitzy showpiece. “You know that is not my kind of music,” he told Krasner. He needed money badly, however, so he eventually relented. On April 22, two months after he had accepted Krasner’s commission, he learned that Manon Gropius, the beautiful 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler (Gustav’s widow) and the architect Walter Gropius, had succumbed to poliomyelitis. Inspired by the death of a girl that he “loved as if she were his own child, from the beginning of her life,” as her mother phrased it, Berg began to work in earnest. He composed most of the Violin Concerto at his country home, Waldhaus, in Velden am Wörthersee, in the Carinthia region of Austria. 

In early June, Berg invited Krasner to join him and his wife, Helene, at Waldhaus. The two men played through the first part of the concerto together, hashing out the solo part. As Berg worked on the second half of the concerto, he asked Krasner to improvise in another room. When the violinist would tire, after playing nonstop for hours on end, Berg would suddenly appear and urge him to continue. By July 15, the score was more or less complete; the orchestration was finished less than one month later. “I have never worked harder in my life,” Berg declared, “and what’s more, the work gave me increasing pleasure.” After obtaining permission from Alma Mahler, he dedicated the Violin Concerto “to the memory of an angel.”

Berg never got the chance to review and correct the published score, and he died before the premiere could take place. Krasner performed the solo role on April 19, 1936, at the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Barcelona. 

A Closer Listen

Cast in two large movements instead of the conventional three, Berg’s Violin Concerto can be further divided into four parts. The first movement comprises an Andante section and a longer Allegretto section. The second movement begins with an Allegro section and concludes with a substantial Adagio. According to many commentators, the first movement represents life, the second death and transfiguration. In the first movement, Berg quotes from a Carinthian folksong, a rustic Ländler that some scholars interpret as a wistful allusion to Marie “Mizzi” Scheucl, the servant girl who bore his illegitimate daughter in 1902, when he was 17 years old. 

Early in the summer of 1935, Berg asked his research assistant, Willi Reich, to send him some of Bach’s cantatas. In the last part of the second movement, Berg incorporates a series of variations on “Es ist genug!” (“It is finished!”), using some of Bach’s original harmonies. The chorale’s melody begins with the last four notes of Berg’s tone row: B, C-sharp, E-flat, and F. Because it contains all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, the tone row is the foundation for twelve-tone composition, a formal procedure that Schoenberg developed and taught to Berg. But Berg’s series of notes also lends itself to a looser, more tonal mode of expression, which accounts for the Violin Concerto’s considerable emotive power.

Copyright 2018 by René Spencer Saller

A bit of bonus content for the true fans:

Alban Berg (born in Vienna, 1885; died in Vienna, 1935, reportedly from an infected insect bite.
Manon and her dad, who doted on her (he wanted custody of her when he and Alma split, but sadly it didn’t work out because Alma, despite her promises during the divorce negotiations, had other ideas).

Teenage opera ephemera

By Posted in Admirable Others, classical, Rants and Appreciations Tagged 3 Comments
Alteouise Devaughn as Orfeo, with beautiful sets and costumes by Louise Nevelson, from an Opera Theater St. Louis production that took place in early June, 1984. This photo ran in the Post-Dispatch originally, and I apologize to whoever holds the copyright and will take it down if need be (although I hope not, because I didn’t take photos and do not have a time machine).

My friend Greg Kessler, who runs and holds the copyright to the invaluable blog St. Louis Punk Archive and its associated Facebook page, was kind enough to scan what I believe is my first foray into writing about what is loosely called classical music (in this case, though, Baroque opera). I won’t lie: rereading this piece after many years–written by a (very) recent high school graduate–it does make me cringe in a few places. I could probably do a lot better now–I hope so, anyway!–but mostly I am just moved by the knowledge that the punk rock fanzine Jet Lag, to which most of my closest friends regularly contributed, scored comp tickets to this fancy-ass Gluck opera–with set and costume designs by Louise Nevelson (!!!), a BFD that even my callow teenage self recognized as such, well, that is just a delightful snapshot of what St. Louis arts culture was like in the mid-80s: “Hey, we have some extra tickets to this opera; maybe we should offer them to the punk rock fanzine people, why not?” And then my editors probably thought, “oh, why not let the girl who last wrote about The Time and Black Flag cover it?” (I’m kidding. We were all good friends by that point, so they knew I had “facets.”)

I also think it’s cool that I went with my friend Cat Pick, whose name then was Cathy Renner. She has her own Substack now, as does her husband and our Jet Lag editor, the first person to recruit me to write for publication, Steve Pick. I urge you to check out both Substacks. If I could remember how to edit or augment my website’s blogroll, I would, but that’s a project for another day.

Another fun local fact that might make me seem hyperprovincial (or more so, that is): my friend Patty Kofron, whom I quoted most recently in my Verdi Requiem notes, was singing in the chorus for that production I saw. I didn’t know her at the time, and it never occurred to me to think in my first exposure to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice that 40 years later I’d be friends with someone who was singing that night. Time, the mindfuck revelator!

I suppose I’ll tag this as juvenilia. I’ll add for benefit of younger readers, who don’t remember how regular people published stuff before the Internet, the convention was to underline or capitalize type that would get italicized today. Sometimes we would go in and draw diacritical marks. That’s why I never got too fussy about the acute accent over the second e in my first name. For years I simply didn’t have the option (on my birth certificate, I think someone typed in an apostrophe or something). And the reason this byline has the surname Spencer instead of Saller is that I had not yet married. Although in a strange coincidence that also suggests hyperprovinciality, I did meet my husband a few months later, in a poetry class at Webster University. We did not start dating until the mid-90s, however.

Verdi’s Requiem

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Giuseppe Verdi (molto bello!)

I wrote about Giuseppe Verdi’s monumental Requiem for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra back in November, and it seems that I never posted my notes for this stunning performance. Either that or the WordPress searchbots are lying to me, and I’m experiencing short-term memory loss, both possibilities I would prefer not to contemplate.

At any rate, here are the notes I wrote, which can also be found on the DSO website, if you click around and expand some menus and so forth. Or you could just read them here.

Verdi’s Requiem

by René Spencer Saller

Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901): Messa da Requiem

I asked a friend, Patty Kofron, a versatile mezzo-soprano who has sung Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem several times, to describe the experience from the performer’s perspective. “I don’t know if I can express how much more it is than the complexity of the double choruses, or the beauty and terror of the music,” she said. “When I sing the ‘Libera me,’ I feel like I am personally begging God to spare me from eternal damnation… and I’m not even religious. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever sung or will ever sing. As much as I love the Brahms, Fauré, Mozart, and other requiems, the Verdi puts my own mortality and my maker right in my face.”

You don’t need to be singing to feel a similar rush. You don’t even need to believe in God. Despite its obvious Judeo-Christian framework, its churchy fugues, and its incense-steeped Latin trappings, this Requiem deals more with the secular than the sacred. For long, delectable stretches, if you tune out the Latin text and simply let the melodies wash over you unmediated, you might convince yourself that you’re listening to a love duet or an arietta, perhaps a quartet backed by large chorus or some showstopper from one of his recent operas. Indeed, Verdi finished Aida, a commission to honor the Suez Canal, in 1871, a few years before the first performance of the Requiem; the two scores share a similar intensity, a dark grandeur bleeding into raw emotion. 

No wonder the Requiem appeals to the nonreligious: Verdi himself was often accused of agnosticism. His second wife, Giuseppina Strepponi, described the composer’s spiritual outlook as a matter of temperament: “Everyone agrees that …he’s the soul of honesty, he understands and feels every noble and delicate sentiment; yet for all that, [he] allows himself to be, I won’t say an atheist, but certainly not much of a believer, and all with a calm obstinance that makes you want to thrash him.”

Everyone who loves Verdi’s Requiem has a favorite part. The concluding “Libera me” gets most of the attention, and deservedly so, but highlights abound. Sometimes it’s the glittering majesty of the “Sanctus” that satiates my brain’s pleasure centers; sometimes it’s the intimate, chamber-music bliss of the “Lux aeterna.” But the Requiem is more than the sum of its parts, and most of its power is cumulative. When the unstoppable “Dies irae” theme returns, it hits us like a sucker punch: we can’t escape our certain deaths. All we can do, awaiting judgment, is express our all too human selves. 

Verdi does more than resurrect the Requiem form: he re-humanizes it, bringing the drama back to individual sinners with enormous needs: for grace, for redemption, for eternal peace, or at least an escape from hellish torment. The singers are relatable in the same way that opera heroes and heroines are relatable: larger than life but fatally flawed. 

Late-Life Superachiever

Over a six-decade career, Verdi wrote 28 operas, easily half of them masterpieces. He produced many of his greatest works when he was in his 70s, at a time when 60 was considered old. He was still at the peak of his powers when he died, on January 27, 1901, a few days after suffering a massive stroke. To this day his funeral ranks as the largest public assembly ever recorded in Italy.

Beyond his genius for indelible melodies, Verdi was a master dramatist. A devotee of Shakespeare, Schiller, Byron, and Voltaire, he read widely and deeply, always on the hunt for the next opera plot. He worked closely with his librettists to ensure minimal flab and maximal feeling. In the world according to Verdi, rage and terror rule, desire redeems and destroys, and the tenor loves bravely forever. 

He was born in Le Roncole (now known as Roncole Verdi), in a rural area then under the control of France. Although he liked to call himself a peasant, his parents were innkeepers, with enough disposable income to pay for his private organ lessons at age four. During his adolescence he lived in Busseto with a patron’s family, growing close to the patron’s daughter, his music pupil. After he failed the entrance examination for the Milan Conservatory, his wealthy future father-in-law paid for three years of private composition lessons.

In 1836, two months after Verdi was appointed director of Busseto’s Philharmonic Society, he married Margherita Barezzi, his patron’s daughter. They had two children, both of whom died as babies. In 1840, a year after the successful premiere of his first opera, Oberto, Verdi’s 26-year-old wife suddenly died, probably from encephalitis. His next effort, a comedy, was a flop, and he considered giving up. But in 1842, Nabucco, his third opera, became the first in a long series of overlapping hits, launching the 29-year-old composer’s international career and securing his fame. 

It was during rehearsals for Nabucco that Verdi met his second wife: the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi, who stepped into the role of Abigaille at the last minute and saved the production. Verdi and Strepponi invited scandal by living together “in sin” (technically, in Paris, Busseto, and finally an estate in Sant’Agata, in his ancestral Parmesan countryside). They married in secret in 1859, and the union lasted until her death, in 1897; Verdi died a few years later. 

At his funeral, thousands of mourners lined the streets while Arturo Toscanini conducted a 900-voice choir in the “Va, pensiero” chorus from Nabucco. Although Verdi was first buried in the Cimitero Monumentale, in Milan, his remains were relocated to the crypt of the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti, a retirement home for musicians that Verdi had founded.

Roots of the Requiem

In 1868, soon after the death of Gioachino Rossini, whom he revered, Verdi pitched a kind of compilation Requiem in honor of the late composer to his publisher, Tito Ricordi, with the various parts supplied by himself and a dozen of Italy’s other leading composers. Verdi composed the final “Libera me.” The memorial mass was not performed in 1869, as originally scheduled, the first anniversary of Rossini’s death. The complete compilation version of the work wasn’t debuted until 1988. 

In 1873, at Verdi’s request, Ricordi returned the “Libera me” score, around the same time that the Italian novelist and poet Allesandro Manzoni died. Verdi’s grief over the loss of Manzoni, a hero of the Risorgimento (the 19th-century Italian unification movement), likely compounded the grief he felt for Rossini. Whatever the source of these strong emotions, Verdi sought expression in the elegiac: he decided to complete the remaining movements of the Requiem—everything save “Libera me,” which he revised significantly. He spent the summer of 1873 composing, or reverse-engineering, a complete Requiem. He believed in the project so strongly that he spent his own money printing the sheet music for the first performance, which he conducted, at the Church of San Marco, in Milan, on May 22, 1874. 

Verdi’s Requiem translates the ancient Latin mass for the dead into the vernacular of Italian opera. Ferocious and crude as a gut punch, tender and transcendent as a kiss, Verdi’s Requiem revels in the dramatic, or at least doesn’t refute the charge lobbed by the conductor Hans von Bülow, who dismissed Verdi’s Requiem as “his latest opera, in ecclesiastical vestments.”

Johannes Brahms, Bülow’s close ally and associate, disagreed. “Bülow has made an almighty fool of himself,” Brahms said after taking in Verdi’s Requiem. “Only a genius could have written such a work.”

Verdi, for his part, tried to distinguish his Requiem from his previous works for the stage. “One mustn’t sing this Mass in the way one sings an opera,” he explained, “and therefore phrasing and dynamics that may be fine in the theater won’t satisfy me at all, not at all.”

Theatricality aside, Verdi taps into the divine by way of the carnal. All the best evangelists understand the link between the loins and the great hereafter. As for theological matters, he was an agnostic and loath to get too preachy. Maybe that’s why his lead quartet often sounds like pairs of lovers singing to other lovers. He understood divine mercy through his art, those melodies that sear our souls like sudden truths. 

In Memory of Two Great Men

Verdi’s “Libera me” was originally written to honor Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), the composer Verdi once called “a glory of Italy.” Verdi called Manzoni’s 1827 novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) “not only the greatest book of our epoch, but one of the greatest ever to emerge from a human brain.”  He called Manzoni himself a “saint.” 

Later, when Manzoni died at age 88—coincidentally, the same age at which Verdi himself would die almost 30 years later—he remembered his contribution to the compilation Requiem and realized that he could build upon this promising foundation.

On June 3, 1873, Verdi wrote to Ricordi of his plans: “I too would like to demonstrate what affection and veneration I bore and bear to that Great Man who is no more, and whom Milan has so worthily honored. I would like to set to music a Mass for the Dead to be performed next year on the anniversary of his death. The Mass would have rather vast dimensions, and besides a large orchestra and a large chorus, it would also require… four or five principal singers…. I would have the copying of the music done at my expense, and I myself would conduct the performance both at the rehearsals and in church.” 

Verdi asked Ricordi to obtain permission from the mayor of Milan. After the project was approved, Verdi got to work. By using the music that he had written for the earlier compilation Requiem, he would need only about an hour’s worth of additional music to frame and complete it. He composed the settings for a multipart “Dies irae” and other sacred texts, and finished it on April 10, 1874. He printed the score at his own expense, as promised, and conducted the first performance in Milan on May 22, one year after Manzoni’s death. Verdi’s original title: “Requiem Mass for the anniversary of the death of Manzoni, 22 May 1874.”

Varieties of Requiem

Technically speaking, a Requiem refers to a musical setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead. Sometime after 1450 and possibly as late as 1470, the Franco-Flemish composer-turned-priest Johannes Ockeghem wrote an early, incomplete polyphonic rendition, minus the Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and Communion. Many significant Requiem settings followed, from the 15th century onward, including Mozart’s iconic unfinished composition from the months, indeed hours, leading up to his death in 1791. Closer to Verdi’s time, Luigi Cherubini composed a stellar pair (1816 and 1836), and Hector Berlioz contributed another even more famous one, sometimes called the Grande Messe des morts (Great Mass of the Dead; 1837). Verdi would have been familiar with all those composers’ works, although his own Requiem was less rooted in the liturgical.

Verdi responded to the Latin text by locating its emotional core, the dramatic significance of each singer’s moral confession. He offers no comforting lies, no confident speculation. Let other composers traffic in the theological; Verdi’s heart is with the human: the soprano, pleading in terror for her salvation, sinful but shining, shining. The tenor, the mezzo, the bass-baritone: all kissed by the holy, implicated and yet innocent. 

A Closer Listen

I. In the opening movement, an appeal on the behalf of the recently departed for a peaceful rest, the chorus sings from the perspective of the mourners. Prefaced by austere low strings, the singers begin with the standard lines “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine” (Grant them eternal rest, O Lord), which the chorus and orchestra intone with a hushed gravitas. Verdi translates the Lord’s promise of endless light into the luminous language of late Romanticism, turning a grief-laden hymn into an operatic anthem. The four solo singers join the chorus and orchestra for a jubilant “Kyrie eleison” (Lord have mercy).

II. The doomy and demonic second movement, the nine-part “Dies irae” (Day of Wrath), slashes and burns through a terrifying series of scenarios wherein the sinners individually confront their wretched souls. What awaits us after death? Eternal perdition or a joy so perfect that the most celestial fugue can only approximate it? The singers roar, wail, whisper, shriek, and hiss; the orchestra invests each scene with the appropriate mood and color. 

The “Dies irae” is based on a poem about Judgment Day commonly attributed to Thomas of Celano, a 13th-century Franciscan monk. In his setting of the ancient text, Verdi squires us through all the stages of grief. Against punishing bass drum and shrieking piccolo, and preceded by apocalyptic brass fanfares, the choristers describe the day that fire consumes the world. Verdi’s melodies do 90 percent of the persuasion, and his Technicolor scoring does the rest. Only a robot could resist the “Recordare,” in which the soprano and the mezzo-soprano sing a lustrous Mozartian rhapsody. Other highlights include the godlike trumpet fanfare of the chorus-driven “Tuba mirum”; the sensuous grip of “Liber scriptus”; the delicate, wind-driven pastorale of “Quid sum miser”; and the pathos-drenched “Lacrymoso,” for solo quartet and chorus, the sinner’s tearful plea for salvation.

III. The solo quartet sings the “Offertorium,” a light-rinsed, lullaby-like testament to the creator’s tender mercies. Here the four singers describe the holy radiance that God promises to bestow on Abraham and his descendants.

IV. The “Sanctus,” a resplendent double fugue for two choruses, is sung from the angelic perspective: divinity casting a fond downward glance at the suffering humans. The angels’ joy seems almost explosive, in contrast to the anguish of the human characters: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord of Hosts! Heaven and earth are filled with your glory!” 

V. Against spare orchestral accompaniment, the chorus, the soprano, and then the mezzo-soprano sing the “Agnus Dei”: “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them rest.” 

VI. Sometimes a cappella and sometimes accompanied by shimmering strings and delicate winds, the mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass deliver the luminous prayer “Lux aeterna” (Light eternal). The violins are divided into six parts to enhance the celestial effect.

VII. The soprano returns, with chorus, for the transcendent “Libera me,” which redirects our attention to the singular terrified sinner. On one level, you can appreciate the final movement as an aria, a gracefully emotive outpouring of bel canto splendor. At its climactic midpoint, the soprano’s high C rips through the chorus to remind us of her individual suffering. The chorus responds, a soothing balm made of light. A wild fugue develops, jagged with accidentals, propelled past terror into panic. Is the sinner consoled or even redeemed by this onslaught of beauty, or simply distracted from the potential terrors of the afterlife? Did she do enough—will we have done enough?—to atone? 

Verdi respects us too much to speak for a God he wasn’t entirely sure even existed. He puts his faith in our collective capacity to figure it out for ourselves. The Requiem ends with the soprano and chorus crooning so softly that they might as well be whispering, “Libera me”: Deliver me. 

Into what, who can say?

Copyright 2022 René Spencer Saller

An Immortal Passes

By Posted in Music Writing, Rants and Appreciations, Rock & Roll and Other Forms of Popular Music Tagged , , 4 Comments
What can you say about a woman brave enough to hang one-handed off the Eiffel Tower? IN SPIKE HEELS? People say the vertiginous scope of the background is mostly an optical illusion, but I call bullshit. Tina Turner was this brave and graceful every second of her life. You can’t persuade me otherwise.

The magnificent Tina Turner died today, although it feels impossible that such a dynamo could be stilled. Like Grace Bumbry, she was an alumna of Sumner High, on the Northside of St. Louis; back then, before the redlining and the strategic disinvestment, it was a jewel of the public school system, among many.

Tina Turner performing in St. Louis, at the Club Imperial, where she and Ike and the band honed their brilliance.



Way back in 2004 I wrote a review of an Ike Turner reissue that was actually an Ike and Tina record in all but name. In it I tried to describe what made her so electrifying to me from the first second I saw and heard her. If you don’t feel like reading, you can just watch this video from 1975, from The Midnight Special show.

Ike Turner 
His Woman, Her Man 
(Funky Delicacies)

It was Ike Turner’s curse and blessing that he hooked up with Anna Mae Bullock, a teenage girl from Nutbush, Tenn. The same might be said of her. She started out as a backup singer in Turner’s band, the Kings of Rhythm; was impregnated by one of said Kings; and then, with a snappy new name and a starring role in the revue, married Turner two years after they met. You’ve seen the movie, so you know how great that turned out. As a husband, Turner was monstrous; as a producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, he was sublime. If you’re one of those either/or types who believe geniuses have to be nice people, or at least not unrepentant dirtbags, remember that Pablo Picasso, Gustav Mahler, John Milton, and countless other cultural heavies all had their moments of misogyny, too. What do we gain by striking them from the canon?

Tina couldn’t help but outshine her mentor and tormentor. Still, even though she sings lead on every track of His Woman, Her Man, this is Ike Turner’s album, not Ike & Tina’s; if you don’t believe it, just look at the CD cover. Call it ungrateful, call it egomaniacal, but allowing Ike the frontman’s spot in this instance seems less unfair when you consider the couple’s careers: Ike is a god to nerdy collectors, but the hoi polloi know him only as the crazy coke fiend who smacked poor Tina around; his ex, on the other hand, she of the killer gams and the major motion pictures and the string of second-heyday hits in the ’80s, is a superstar. Who among us hasn’t whiled away a summer afternoon pretending to be Tina Turner, baring those famous golden thighs, shaking an imaginary shock of coppery hair, screaming and sighing and strutting and signifying like a sex-starved Pentecostal? Who else could sing like that, each phrase razor-blade bright and so sharp it doesn’t even hurt at first when it slices your heart in two? 

But try to hear past Tina’s coruscating wail, the glamour that flares off every gritty syllable, and pause to savor Ike’s instrumental flourishes–the ARP synthesizer fed through a wah-wah pedal, the improbably funky “funk box” (an early drum machine), the oscillator, the countless crazy gadgets he collected at his Bolic Studio. His Woman, Her Man‘s 17 tracks were recorded there in 1970, when Ike, hoping to cultivate a bigger rock audience, began to experiment with what was then cutting-edge technology. 

The results are strange but consistently compelling. Depending on your mood, you might crave the percolating country-soul of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary (The Funky Version),” which Ike and Tina later rerecorded (the somewhat less funky version that anyone who’s ever listened to an oldies station knows by heart). Their first rendition thrums and pulses like the dirty river they’re celebrating, a long, sticky shudder of sound. Another cover, “I’ve Got My Mojo Working,” is as viciously sexy as anything the Stones ever recorded, and the percussion (it sounds like kerosene igniting) neatly punctuates Ike’s layers of brilliant guitar filth. 

The weirdest cover, though, has to be Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed.” In retrospect, the poignancy of this choice is almost unbearable (she did bleed, of course, and not just during her period); knowing that her abusive husband persuaded her to sing it, against her better judgment, makes it especially painful. 

Fortunately, the mood lifts with the next track, “It’s Groovier Across the Line,” a bouncy sex romp that’s one among many great Ike compositions here. Dig the fried-out guitars on “Brain Game” or the squealing, almost unlistenable synths on “Baby Get It On,” the aural equivalent of crystal meth and undoubtedly the best song you’ve never heard. Every listen yields a new favorite, another if-only classic. His Woman, Her Man might not absolve Ike of his personal transgressions, but it secures his status as an icon.

Copyright 2004 by René Spencer Saller
This review was originally published in the Illinois Times and later reprinted by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (along with my reviews of Wilco and Eminem, it won first place in the annual Association of Alternative Weeklies awards in 2005).

On Birdsong and Messiaen

By Posted in Admirable Others, General, classical, Rants and Appreciations Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Olivier Messiaen, transcribing birdsong, which he incorporated in most of his compositions, especially in later decades.

The synesthete and mystic-slash-ecstatic composer and organist Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) has long been a favorite of mine, but lately I find myself thinking a lot about his use of birdsong. He wasn’t the only composer to transcribe birdsong–Mozart and Beethoven did it, too–but no one listened to birdsong more closely or with greater devotion. According to some estimates, he incorporated the songs of more than 320 birds in his music. According to his colleague and sometime frenemy Pierre Boulez, “what he wrote was his imagination of birdsong.” Imagination aside, Messiaen did meticulous research on his beloved subjects and became something of an ornithological expert in France, and certainly one of the leading authorities on bird vocalizations. When he died, at 83, his widow, Yvonne Martenot, commissioned a bird sculpture for his headstone.

I learned a lot about Messiaen’s use of birdsong from this website, to which I’m sure I will return often.

And why have I been thinking about birdsong so much? It’s the Merlin Bird ID app from Cornell Ornithology lab, my new favorite addiction. So far in my backyard I have recorded a good couple dozen different species, and I’m learning to distinguish them without the Sound ID app being on, although I love to have it on anyway just in case it picks up something I miss. Messiaen lacked this app, but he more than made up for it in his listening and transcribing skills.

I could share any number of bird-related links, but I have chosen Catalogue d’oiseaux, composed between 1956 and 1958; he dedicated it to his second wife, former pupil, and forever muse, the brilliant Yvonne Loriod (1924-2010). Her sister, Jeanne, played the recently invented Ondes Martenot in Messiaen’s extraordinary Turangalîla Symphonie, the only symphony in his substantial catalogue.

Catalogue d’oiseaux contains his transcriptions of songs by more than 80 species of birds, all lovingly labeled in the score. The 13 movements feature birds from the eastern French Alps, then the southern Spanish border, then the northern coast. The composition, which takes about 2 hours and 45 minutes to perform in its entirety, is dedicated to Yvonne, like all of Messiaen’s major piano works since about 1942, when he met the former child prodigy in his harmony class, the first he had taught after being imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. Loriod impressed him from the start by playing his Eight Preludes from memory. (It wasn’t difficult for her in the slightest, thanks to her photographic memory. By 12 she had memorized all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, as well as Mozart’s concertos. Two years later she had committed Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and all of Chopin and Schumann to memory.) The pupil and professor fell in love right away, but they couldn’t marry until 1961, two years after Messiaen’s first wife, the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, died as a result of cerebral atrophy, after nearly 20 years of suffering from total amnesia and other cognitive problems. Messiaen, a devout if somewhat unconventional Roman Catholic, had sole custody of their only son and wouldn’t consider divorcing her, even after falling in love with Loriod. He visited Delbos often, even though she never recognized him.

Loriod is fascinating in her own right. She was also a respected composer, although her works, unsurprisingly, were seldom performed, and she remains underprogrammed. She spent most of her life playing and promoting her husband’s music.

Yvonne Loriod and Olivier Messiaen
Olivier and Yvonne, poring over a score, their love language.

The Composer Speaks

“I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.”

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“It’s probable that in the artistic hierarchy birds are the greatest musicians existing on our planet.”

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“The birds are the opposite of time. They represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song.”

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A bird’s song is something extraordinary, an absolutely impenetrable chaos, a prodigious entanglement.” 

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“[…] In order to translate these timbres, harmonic combinations are absolutely necessary. Even in very fast movements, where I reproduce bird songs either in the orchestra, or on the piano, each note is provided with a chord, not a traditional chord, but a complex of sounds destined to give the timbre of that note. There are as many invented chords as there are notes, which is to say for a bird piece comprising of one or two thousand notes, there are one or two thousand invented chords. It is an enormous task for the imagination….”

“…Birds always sing in a given fashion.  They do not know the octave interval. Their melodic lines often recall the inflections of Gregorian chant. Their rhythms are of infinite complexity and variety, but always of perfect precision and clarity.”

Messiaen at the organ. He would serve as organist at La Trinité, in Paris, for more than 60 years.

Rest easy, Rita Lee

By Posted in Admirable Others, Music Writing, Rants and Appreciations, Rock & Roll and Other Forms of Popular Music, Various Worthwhile Things 2 Comments
Rita Lee in 2010

The sui generis Brazilian singer Rita Lee died a few days ago, on May 8, and I didn’t want to let the sad occasion go unremarked here, even though I don’t have time to write the tribute she deserves right now. (Filthy lucre! But the good kind.) So I went through the ol’ archives and found a record review that I wrote in 1999 about the great Luaka Bop compilation (curated by David Byrne) Everything is Possible!

The RFT links are always iffy for me, so I’m cutting and pasting the review here instead. And if you don’t have any Os Mutantes records, you could do worse than start with this collection. Really, though, you can’t go wrong with any of it. Back when I did a weekly community radio show on KDHX FM-88, I played a lot of Os Mutantes, probably at least a track or two every month, and found that it always went over well. It’s impossible to quantify but safe to say that Rita Lee’s artistry and charisma are a big part of the timeless appeal.

OS MUTANTES

Everything Is Possible! (Luaka Bop)

By René Spencer Saller on Wed, Jul 21, 1999 at 4:00 am

To say Os Mutantes, a Brazilian trio formed in the late ’60s, were ahead of their time is to understate their singular genius, to suggest that we’ve somehow caught up with them. If only! The music founding members Arnaldo Baptista, Rita Lee Jones, and Sergio Dias created together, a crazy amalgam of psychedelia, bossa nova, experimental rock, samba and pop, is timeless: it sounds as innovative today as it must have sounded 30 years ago, and it will probably sound just as brilliant 30 years from now. Everything Is Possible! is a fabulous compilation of songs the Mutantes recorded between 1968 and 1972, ranging from the trippy, cannabis-inspired “Ando Meio Desligado,” which sets Jones’ silvery vocals against a bass line cribbed from the Zombies’ “Time of the Season,” whacked-out keyboards, and distorted electric guitars, to the exquisite “Fuga No. 11,” with its tinkly bells and majestic Sgt. Pepper-inflected strings and horns. Every song on the CD is at once gorgeous and freakish, catchy and cacophonous, familiar and deeply mysterious. It’s no surprise that fans of the Mutantes include Beck, David Byrne, Stereolab’s Tim Gane, Arto Lindsay, and the late Kurt Cobain (who tried unsuccessfully to convince them to reunite so they could open for Nirvana in 1993).

With Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Tom Z, and Gal Costa, Os Mutantes were part of the Tropicália movement, an avant-garde group of leftist musicians who sought to revolutionize Brazilian pop culture with the use of electric instruments, subversive humor, far-out stage personas, and surreal arrangements. They pissed off just about everybody, from uptight leftist folkies (think of the guy who screamed “Judas!” during Bob Dylan’s electric tour in 1966) to the draconian military dictatorship, which effectively killed the movement shortly after its inception by arresting Gil and Velosa and forcing them into exile. Even under censorship, however, Os Mutantes continued to record, releasing a handful of albums (the first three, reissued on the Omplatten label, are highly recommended) before they broke up for good in 1978. Live, they dressed up like Sancho Panza, a pregnant bride, and space aliens. They wrote songs with outrageous titles such as “Ave Lucifer” (“Hail Lucifer”). They created their own instruments, from the backwards wah-wah pedal on “Dia 36” to the can of bug spray used in place of a high hat on “Le Premier Bonheur du Jour.” What more could anyone want from a band? They’ll blow your mind, they’ll crack you up, they’ll steal your heart, and they’ll make you believe that everything is possible.

Copyright 1999 by René Spencer Saller



Orffully Popular!

By Posted in Music Writing, Program Notes, Rants and Appreciations Tagged , , , , 3 Comments
The German composer Carl Orff, looking like someone I’m rather certain I would like.

I have been doing this program-book annotation work for about 10 years now, possibly a little longer, since I never seemed to bother paying attention to when I started. But I think I can say with some confidence that this is the first program I have ever written about that came with a warning, to wit: “PLEASE NOTE:  Carmina Burana addresses adult themes and contains some adult language.” (Catulli Carmina, also on the program, probably contains more, but I digress.)

At any rate, I write about Orff fairly often, and I always resist the urge to use any of the atrocious name-based puns that flap around in my sorry noggin like deranged bats. But this is my blog–I pay for it entirely myself and do not profit from it in any way that would interest my accountant–and I’m going to share one of my Orfful Orff puns in the headline. I have always felt that it’s supremely unfair to mock people for their given names, but when the composer has been dead for a long time, I think it’s slightly more forgivable. Or less Orfful. (Please let this usage exorcise my demons)

Here are the notes I wrote for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert that’s taking place tonight and this weekend at the Meyerson.

Luisi Conducts Orff

by René Spencer Saller

Carl Orff (1895–1982): Catulli Carmina (Songs of Catullus)

If you are alive today, chances are you have been exposed to the influence of Orff. Don’t recognize the name? Doesn’t matter. You probably had a grade-school music teacher who did. Maybe you lucked out and got to attend an elementary school with a collection of Orff instruments, specially chosen percussion instruments tuned to sound harmonious even in (especially in!) untrained hands, and maybe you learned about pitch and meter by playing Orff-prescribed games and using your body in motion to express these abstractions, as my public grade-school classmates and I did, in an inner-ring suburb of St. Louis in the 1970s. 

But even if you never took a music class, you can surely hum the main hook to Orff’s “O Fortuna,” from his iconic Carmina Burana, whose ubiquity in the popular culture is, as Alex Ross memorably quipped, “proof that it contains no diabolical message, indeed that it contains no message whatsoever.” Orff’s music might not have a message, but it is an undeniably effective vehicle. His musical language—relentless rhythms, hammered-home melodies, crude harmonies—helped the Nazis sell their poison, and the same music helped sell laundry detergent a generation later.

The late musicologist and critic Richard Taruskin rejected the art-for-art’s-sake argument that music is essentially innocent, pointing out that questions about Orff’s intentions—specifically regarding the use of his music by the Nazis—are irrelevant because “[t]hey allow the deflection of any criticism of his work into irrelevant questions of rights: Orff’s right to compose his music, our right to perform and listen to it. Without questioning either, one may still regard his music as toxic, whether it does its animalizing work at Nazi rallies, in school auditoriums, at rock concerts, in films, in the soundtracks that accompany commercials, or in [the concert hall].” (With no disrespect toward Taruskin’s memory, I’d be astonished if you leave the Meyerson tonight any more animalized than you were upon entering it.)


The commentator Anne-Charlotte Rémond of France Musique recently observed that if Orff’s music isn’t “Nazi art,” it’s art “made for Nazis.” For many that’s a distinction with no real difference. Never mind that Orff never actually joined the Nazi party, or that his music wasn’t universally admired by Nazi listeners; one prominent Nazi critic, in fact, argued that Carmina Burana, with its pungent “jazzy atmosphere” and “incomprehensible” Latin text, reflected the decadence and depravity of the Weimar Republic, not the wholesome athleticism that the Nazis tried to celebrate in their racist and revisionist interpretation of ancient history. But with a few vocal exceptions, the Nazis loved Carmina Burana, programming it repeatedly until the regime was defeated after World War II.

If not quite a one-hit wonder, Orff remains a somewhat enigmatic, even polarizing figure. He completed Catulli Carmina in 1943, two years after receiving the commission and about six years after his breakthrough work, Carmina Burana.  Catulli Carmina received its premiere during World War II. With Trionfo di Afrodite, from 1953, the three works form a conceptual trilogy, but the two later installments never took off like their predecessor and are virtually unknown today. But whether acknowledged or not, Orff’s influence can be heard in the driving rhythms of John Adams, the hypnotic ostinatos of Glass and Cage. There’s a reason that generations of listeners have found his music so compelling, and it has little to do with politics or anything that cerebral: Orff made music that speaks to the body and to the subconscious.

Although Orff had loved the classics since childhood, he was 35 years old when he first encountered Catullus’s Odi et Amo (c. 85), while on holiday at Lake Garda, in northern Italy. He saw a postcard with the poem on it and instantly heard it as music in his head. When he returned to Germany, he bought an edition of Catullus poems and chose 10 to set for mixed choir, which he then edited in a two-volume set titled Catulli Carmina, in 1931 and 1932, respectively. 

When his Carmina Burana grew increasingly popular, theater directors requested more musical material to fill out their programs, so Orff revised the score, adding and deleting certain poems and surrounding them with a “framing” story, which places the drama within a drama, enhancing the artificiality of the narrative. The new version of Catulli Carmina—which he now called ludi scaenici, or a scenic cantata, and no longer a collection of songs for mixed choir—premiered on November 6, 1943, at the Leipzig Opera. 

A Closer Listen

The cantata contains three parts: a prelude, a central section made up of Catullus poems, and a short postlude that repeats the main ideas of the prelude. Orff scored it for a full mixed choir, soprano and tenor soloists (portraying Lesbia and Catullus, respectively), and an entirely percussive orchestra, thought to be inspired by Stravinsky’s Les noces: four pianos, four timpani, castanets, maracas, antique cymbal, tam-tam, lithophone, metallophone, two glockenspiels, xylophone, tenor xylophone, and more. The orchestra plays only in the prelude and postlude; in the play-within-the-play, the soloists are accompanied only by the chorus, which also functions as a traditional Greek chorus.

Orff uses Catullus poems for the bulk of the text, but he wrote the prelude, the framing device that turns the selected poems into a play within a play. The plot, such as it is, involves a group of exuberant young horndogs who, in the prelude, describe what they want to do to one another in pornographic detail, if not quite in grammatical Latin. Then a chorus of elderly crabasses propose a lecture in the form of dramatized Catullus poems, all designed to prove conclusively that love is for losers and nothing lasts. The young folk agree to listen attentively.

The internal play begins with the entrance of Catullus, accompanied by the chorus singing Odi et amo (“I hate and I love”). When his beloved Lesbia appears, he sings Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus (“let us live, my Lesbia, and love”). Eventually, though, Lesbia proves untrue by dancing in front of a tavern, loitering on corners, and engaging in other activities for which Catullus tries to slut-shame her. Conflicted, he sleeps outside her front door and dreams of their reconciliation. Meanwhile, the real-life Lesbia sings him a lullaby while he sleeps (Dormi, dormi, dormi ancora—note that it’s in Italian, not Latin, a sign that she’s a modern lady). But Catullus wakes with a jolt when he hears the bass voice, and he experiences an epiphany: his friend Caelius, to whom he has often confided, is Lesbia’s secret lover—cuckolded by his best pal!

After much anguished back and forth with the pleading Lesbia, Catullus decides that her actions have ruined him and he can neither love nor hate her now. The score boasts several memorable passages, including some bel canto soprano numbers worthy of Delibes. Then, in one of the best punch lines in the history of the cantata form, Orff subverts the entire spectacle by showing, in the postlude, that the production was a waste of time. No longer willing to endure the sour old dudes and their strange diatribes, the young people blithely resume hooking up.

Carmina Burana 

After the successful premiere of his scenic cantata Carmina Burana, Orff issued the following instructions to his music publisher:

“Everything I have written to date, and which you have, unfortunately, printed, can be destroyed. With Carmina Burana, my collected works begin.”

First performed by the Oper Frankfurt on June 8, 1937, Orff’s Carmina Burana is based on a collection of poems by a motley assortment of itinerant monks, scholars, and other speakers of Latin, the lingua franca of the medieval age. Old French and Middle-High German, along with macaronic hybrids, add linguistic variety to these stubbornly secular, often bawdy verses, which touch on the corruption of the clergy, the benefits of intoxication, the sorrow of love, the glories of nature, and the pitiless wheel of fortune that determines our destinies. The original manuscript dates to the early 13th century. Lost for centuries before being rediscovered at a Benedictine abbey near Munich, the score was first published in 1847. 

With the help of Michel Hofmann, his fellow classics enthusiast, Orff selected two dozen poems from the collection and set them to music. “It’s not sophisticated, not intellectual,” he wrote, “There is a spiritual power behind my work, and that’s why it is accepted throughout the world.”

Orff In and Out of Time

Another way to understand Orff’s work is by understanding Orff, who was both a product of his culture and also something of an aberration.

Born in Munich, which was then part of imperial Wilhelmine Germany, Orff was brought up in a Bavarian military family, in a culture that understood itself to be the natural extension of both Athens and Rome, an aspirational lineage connecting the not-yet-unified Germany with the Golden Age of the Greco-Roman empire. Even as a young composer in post-WWI Germany, Orff, who studied at the Munich Academy of Music from 1912–14, was a devoted antiquarian. Although he set the occasional text by a contemporary or near-contemporary, such as the unapologetically leftist German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, or by canonical German poets such as Heinrich Heine and Friederich Hölderlin, Orff increasingly preferred engaging with centuries-old Latin and Archaic Greek texts by Catullus and Sappho, the primary sources for Carmina catullus and Trionfo, respectively. For his musical enjoyment he preferred poring over the scores of J.S. Bach, Monteverdi, and other early composers of choral music. And although his parents were devout Roman Catholics, Orff lost his religion fairly early and chose not to have his own daughter baptized.

Like most of his non-Jewish colleagues, Orff remained in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich, although he never went so far as to join the Nazi Party. He was drafted into the German Army in August 1917 but was quickly incapacitated in a trench collapse and spent months recovering from his serious injuries. When he was healthy again, he began to work in various administrative capacities for opera houses while studying music and dance and developing his pedagogical theory, which he called Schulwerk. Although he associated with a leader of the Resistance who was later executed, he distanced himself from politics, mostly by keeping to himself and making the kind of art that wasn’t likely to endanger himself or his family. He wasn’t notably brave, and he was no doubt relieved when the Nazis put him on a list of approved composers they called the Gottbegnadeten (Those Graced by God, or Those with God-Given Talent—which would no doubt be more impressive as a title if Nazis hadn’t bestowed it). 

Though not technically a Nazi, Orff was a member of the Reichsmusikkammer, a requirement for all active musicians in the Third Reich. And despite any reservations he might have expressed privately, he did agree to compose new music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream to replace Mendelssohn’s classic score, which the authorities had banned on account of the composer’s Jewish ancestry—never mind that Mendelssohn had been a devout Lutheran since childhood. And never mind that one of Orff’s Catholic grandparents was a former Jew turned Catholic. The Nazis weren’t ideologically consistent, and they didn’t need to be. As with any genocidal regime, approval was granted or denied according to the whims of the powerful.

 After completing his denazification process in 1946, Orff was rated “Grey C, acceptable,” a designation intended for Germans who were “compromised by their actions during the Nazi period but not subscribers to Nazi doctrine.” He married four times and was thrice divorced. His only child, Godela Orff, was born in 1921, to his first wife, the singer Alice Solscher. Although the couple separated about six months after Godela’s birth and divorced in 1927, Orff assumed primary custody of his daughter when her mother moved to Australia in 1930. Orff’s relationship with Godela was often rocky, with periods of estrangement, but they reconciled about a decade before his death, at age 86, from cancer. His tombstone, which is located in the Andechs monastery, bears the Latin inscription Summus Finis (the Ultimate End), a quotation from the end of his final work, De temporum fine comoedia.

A Closer Listen

Orff’s score bears a lengthy Latin subtitle, which, in translation, reads: “Profane songs to be sung by soloists and chorus with an accompaniment of instruments and magic tableaux.” By turns crude and celestial, the songs reflect Orff’s passion for the plainchant of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. As anyone who has ever sung it will attest, some of it amounts to vocal-cord torture. The aria Olem lacus colueram, for instance, is sung almost entirely in falsetto, straining the poor solo tenor’s voice to the breaking point—which makes sense when you remember that the lines are sung from the perspective of a roasting swan. A wildly erotic passage in “Cours d’amour” forces the soprano soloist to reach beyond the upper limits of her range, creating an exquisite tension. 

“In all my work,” Orff wrote, “my final concern is not with musical but with spiritual exposition.” This claim might seem at odds with the visceral, almost orgiastic sonic thrust of Carmina Burana, but Orff, like the medieval poets who inspired him, knew that the spiritual and the profane are spokes of the same cosmic wheel.
Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

The Dallas Symphony performs a Katherine Balch world premiere, plus works by Borodin and Stravinsky

By Posted in Music Writing, Program Notes, Rants and Appreciations Tagged , , , , , 2 Comments
Katherine Balch, composer, by Lanz Photography

It was my great privilege to write the program notes for the world premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto for Cello and Orchestra. If you’re in Dallas or going to be in Dallas this coming weekend, you should by all means attempt to secure tickets to this event and go. Associate DSO Conductor (and former SLSO Associate Conductor) Gemma New leads the Dallas Symphony in what promises to be an exciting (and perhaps even riotous) springtime ritual.

You can read my notes on the excellent Dallas Symphony Orchestra website, but I included some bonus material that got snipped for space, and I have learned my lesson with links (which don’t seem to be as permanent as I had naively imagined when I started this website). This also gives me the chance to include some cherished photos. I also decided to reframe the concert title and shift the emphasis from The Rite of Spring (no offense to Stravinsky, who I’m confident cares not a whit whether he gets top billing) to the world premiere of the whisper concerto. I understand that the orchestra, like all 21st-century ensembles, has to consider what sells tickets, but as a blogger who is entirely self-financed, I do not.

Speaking of which, and before I forget, here are Balch and soloist Zlatomir Fung in conversation about whisper concerto.

I also want to recommend Balch’s website, which is among the best I have ever seen. You can actually peruse the score for the whisper concerto and marvel over the precise performance instructions and notes on instrumentation. I know people throw around the word “genius” way too often, but if Balch isn’t a genius, I’m not sure if the designation even matters.

New Conducts Borodin, Balch, and Stravinsky

by Rene Spencer Saller

Alexander Porfiriyevich Borodin (1833–1887): Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor

Like Tchaikovsky, who was seven years younger, Borodin was born in Saint Petersburg and died unexpectedly at age 53. The two composers knew each other somewhat but traveled in different circles. Borodin, a prominent professor of chemistry, moonlighted as a member of the Moguchaya Kuchka, or “Mighty Handful”: five influential composers who dominated Saint Petersburg’s musical culture from the mid-1860s until the early 1880s. Besides Borodin, “the Five,” as they were often called, consisted of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, César Cui, and Mily Balakirev. Only Balakirev had the luxury of composing full-time; the others had day jobs. Borodin, the illegitimate son of a Georgian prince, published major treatises on acids and aldehydes. 

“I do not seek recognition as a composer for I am somehow ashamed of admitting to my compositional activities,” the research chemist wrote in a letter. “For me this is a relaxation, a pastime, an indulgence that distracts me from my principal work.”

After Borodin’s death from a sudden brain aneurysm, a monument was erected in Saint Petersburg. The statue honored his scientific achievements—his music was admired by connoisseurs but still mostly unknown to the general public. His most ambitious work, Prince Igor, remained unfinished at his death. Even though Borodin didn’t live to complete the opera, he was alive in 1879, when Rimsky-Korsakov conducted a performance of its climactic Act II closing number, Polovtsian Dances.

Borodin’s friends Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov relied on their memories and the late composer’s towering piles of papers to complete Prince Igor, a monumental effort at which Borodin had been plugging away, on and off, for the past 18 years. The world premiere of the full opera took place on November 4, 1890, at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg.

A Closer Listen

Especially for an amateur composer, Borodin had remarkably strong melodic instincts, a knack for vivid orchestration, and a disciplined work ethic. Like all his best work, the score for Prince Igor enlivens a staunch nationalism with exotic, even mildly subversive touches. Based on a scenario by Vladimir Stasov, Borodin’s self-penned libretto involves a medieval Russian prince who is defeated by a tribe of Tatar invaders, the Polovtsians, and held captive—although treated as an honored guest—until he makes a daring escape.

Prince Igor, Borodin dryly observed, is “essentially a national opera, interesting only to us Russians, who love to steep our patriotism in the sources of our history, and to see the origins of our nationality again on the stage.” A dedicated researcher, he studied the culture of the region, particularly its songs and dances, derived from a diverse mixture of influences and folk traditions. His musical portrait of the Polovtsians, epitomized by The Polovtsian Dances, incorporates not only authentic Caucasian tunes but also Moorish melodies by way of North Africa and the Middle East. 

In its original context, as a ballet sequence, The Polovtsian Dances closes Act II of Prince Igor. For this hook-happy show-stopper, Khan Konchak presents a menu of sensuous splendors available to the prince once he consents to stop fighting the Polovtsians. As a parade of sultry concubines and catamites sashay and shimmy for the barbarian chief, along with his court and captives, Borodin tempts the ear with a seductive array of dances: ambiguously ethnic (or “Orientalist,” as postcolonial critics might argue); rich in orchestral color and harmonic interest; rhythmically complex but still conducive to graceful human movement. 

In addition to serving as an exhilarating concert opener, as it does here, The Polovtsian Dances inspired some of the music in the 1953 musical Kismet, which turned the tantalizing woodwind-sung main theme into “Stranger in Paradise,” a monster Broadway hit that enjoyed even greater success when the musical was repackaged as a star-studded MGM movie. Crooned by pop idols, hummed in countless showers, whistled on the way to work, Borodin’s music is much more famous than the man who created it. Anonymous ubiquity: the hallmark of a true classic.

Katherine Balch (b. 1991): whisper concerto: for Solo Cello and Orchestra 

The winner of the 2020–21 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Balch was nominated for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s 2020 Career Advancement Award by violinist Hilary Hahn. Balch, who earned advanced degrees in music from Yale and Columbia, is currently a visiting assistant professor of composition at the Yale School of Music. Her work has been commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, L’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the London Sinfonietta, and Ensemble Intercontemporain, among many other prominent orchestras and ensembles. 

Dubbed “some kind of musical Thomas Edison” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Balch constructs distinctive sound worlds unique to each new composition. The prolific young composer engineers an eclectic but efficient sonic code, precisely calibrated to the needs of a particular project, incorporating everything from toy instruments to tuned crystal water goblets, earthenware pots, and pianos prepared according to painstakingly detailed instructions involving color-coded graphs and elaborate symbols. 

In the score for Balch’s new Dallas Symphony Orchestra co-commission whisper concerto, every element of the sound is mapped to the minutest detail, right down to images of all the specific objects that she used to modify the strings of the prepared piano. She provides specific instructions for most of the other instruments, too, whether it’s col legno battuto bowing for the strings, which requires the musician to strike the strings with the wooden part of the bow normally held by the fingers, or a passage where the cello’s bow is swapped out for a bamboo chopstick. Elsewhere she calls for nontraditional variations on traditional techniques such as pizzicato or flutter tonguing. In some glorious version of an afterlife, John Cage and Henry Cowell are surely smiling.

Composed in 2022, whisper concerto is true to Balch’s style in that it sounds at once perfectly idiomatic and utterly strange. Beautiful—sometimes even conventionally tonal—melodies commune lovingly with shameless noise. Virtuosity gives way to entropy only to catch its breath and come back weirder and wilder, transformed by the volatile power of orchestral collaboration. Shards and fragments of free jazz mysteriously reassemble themselves, against all odds, into a peculiar chorale.

“The end of my concerto deals with elements of Ligeti’s noise-based cadenza, but in a different, more tonal context,” Balch explained in a recent interview with Rita Fernandes of The Strad magazine. 

One challenge that she confronted while composing her cello concerto was maintaining some kind of fruitful equilibrium between the solo instrument and the orchestra. ‘The cello’s low register can be difficult to balance, and I really wanted to honor the integrity of the instrument’s tessitura,” she told Fernandes. “It’s never a battle between cello and orchestra. I want them to fit together in a way that provokes intimacy between them.”


The Composer Speaks

“whisper concerto is named after the bristling, agitato ‘whisper cadenza’ of György Ligeti’s cello concerto. Like Artifacts, my concerto for violin and orchestra, this piece is not meant as a showcase for cello alone, but for the orchestra as a whole, which reacts to and augments the soloist. 

“whisper concerto is a working out of several musical contradictions I find expressively intriguing: how can an andante be agitato? A presto, dolcissimo? How can a cadenza play (and be playful) with the evolving demands and expectations of performer virtuosity? How can a simple chorale become the shadow of a desperate, fluttering, noisy scorrevole? In folding together these musical opposites, I hope to have captured some of the kinetic virtuosity of Zlatomir’s playing, for whom this concerto is dedicated, along with his kindness, playfulness, gentleness of spirit, and warmth.” —Katherine Balch

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Some Terms Defined

Andante: Moderately slow tempo, as in a walking pace
Agitato: In an agitated manner

Cadenza: An improvised or composed ornamental passage designed for virtuosic display and typically performed in a rhythmically loose style
Chorale: Hymn or psalm form harmonized according to a set of conventional procedures
Dolcissimo: Very sweet or soft
Presto: Quick

Scorrevole: Gliding or flowing from note to note 

Tessitura: Italian for “texture,” the term refers to the range of notes or general pitch level at which the voice (of the singer or instrument) most comfortably resides, without strain or undue challenge.

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Igor Stravinsky in his later years, with cat. He rarely smiled in photos, probably because he didn’t normally get to cradle a cat in his arms.

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971): Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)

Without the efforts of some crucial creative partners, Stravinsky’s iconic ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) would not exist in its current form—or perhaps at all. 

Among the Russian composer’s most essential collaborators were three of his fellow countrymen: the painter and archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, who helped develop the two-part scenario and to whom the score is dedicated; the choreographer and impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who commissioned it for Les Ballets Russes; and Vaslav Nijinsky, the insurgent young choreographer whose savage kinetic language may have actually provoked the riot for which Stravinsky’s music is credited. 

Stravinsky was in his late 20s and still relatively unknown when he began working with Diaghilev. The proud young composer almost passed on the opportunity after Diaghilev was late to their first meeting. Just as Stravinsky was about to slip out the street exit, Diaghilev hurried to stop him. “I’ve often wondered if I’d opened that door,” Stravinsky told his biographer, “whether I would have written The Rite of Spring.“

A Pagan Sacrifice

Sometime in 1910, while polishing the score of his first Diaghilev commission, The Firebird, Stravinsky was distracted by “a fleeting vision, which came to me as a complete surprise.” According to his own account, he imagined “a solemn pagan rite [wherein] sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” 

Instead of pursuing this idea immediately, he finished The Firebird and began his next ballet, the folk-inflected, pathos-drenched Petrushka. It wasn’t until July 1911 that he resumed work on what eventually became The Rite of Spring (with the subtitle “Pictures from Pagan Russia”). He and Roerich hashed out the story and discussed potential dance movements. That September, back at his family’s estate in Ustilug, Stravinsky was eager to plunge into the score. “I’ve already started composing,” he wrote. “I’ve sketched the prelude, and I’ve gone on and also sketched the ‘Divination with Twigs’; I’m terribly excited! The music is coming out fresh.”

He continued to work on it the following winter, in Switzerland, finishing the first act in late February. In a letter to a friend he exclaimed, “it’s as if 20 years, not two, have passed since the composition of Firebird!” That March he traveled to Monte Carlo and played the first part of the score for Diaghilev and Nijinsky as a piano reduction. They’re “wild about it,” he boasted to his mother. 

Pierre Monteux, who would later conduct the infamous premiere, wasn’t so favorably impressed. “I was convinced he was raving mad,” the Frenchman confessed. “The very walls resounded as Stravinsky pounded away, occasionally stamping his feet and jumping up and down…. My only comment at the end was that such music would surely cause a scandal.” 

Riot Act

After completing the orchestration in spring 1913, Stravinsky traveled to Paris to oversee the rehearsals. The dancers and musicians found the piece so daunting that an unprecedented number of practice sessions were scheduled. The exotic tonalities and erratic rhythms notwithstanding, the dress rehearsal went well. 

The actual premiere was a different story. The opening bassoon solo—written entirely above middle C—upset a very vocal contingent of the audience. Almost immediately, the patrons were shouting, blowing whistles, and shoving one another. Because the dancers couldn’t hear the orchestra over the fracas, they fell out of sync. Diaghilev screamed from the wings and Stravinsky panicked, but Monteux soldiered on. He was, in Stravinsky’s approving assessment, as “impervious and nerveless as a crocodile.” “It is still almost incredible to me,” the composer later remarked, “that he actually brought the orchestra through to the end.”

Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller